Rules for Visiting is a thought-provoking, modern novel about friendship.
The 40 something protagonist finds herself at a loss and realises her friends, at some point, must have gone missing from her life. She sets about to rekindle those friendships in this charming story.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me read an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

A thoughtful novel a novel that will make you think of your life your friends those you were so close with at one point but have lost touch with.May a woman in her forties decides to visit these lost friends May who has lost her mother who lives a lonely life embarks on a journey that kept me reading and thinking about my friends that I lost touch with.and maybe reconnecting.#netgalley#granatabooks.

I’m sorry, I only got to 15% of this novel before I stopped. I had a badly formatted book that disrupted the flow. It did seemed be a slow start but with the formatting issue I never connected with the story at all.

At first glance this seems like an uplifting, feel-good story in the vein of other books published recently - a lonely, socially awkward, middle-aged woman seeking resolution to her issues with family and her life to date. It is indeed this kind of story, but to my mind written with a little more subtlety and with a wider focus on the nature of friendship in the modern technological age. Are emojis and likes, no matter how frequent, enough to keep a friendship alive and meaningful? Are visits longer than an hour or two welcomed these days?

A few of May’s thoughts worth sharing:

‘“I wanted to pay you a visit”, I said on the phone. Why do we “pay” visits and “receive” guests? It’s the language of accounting, of ledgers and balance sheets. But no-one likes to admit keeping track, good manners forbid it.’

‘It seems to me that your oldest friends can offer a glimpse of who you were from a time before you had a sense of yourself and that’s what I’m after.’

‘I suppose what you are reading is my attempt to settle. There’s a story I’ve been trying to tell, one about friendship and friends and what place they have in a life, and one I’ve been trying not to tell about my family. Does that make me an unreliable narrator? To a certain extent, aren’t we all? We don’t get to write from scratch the whole story of our lives. We are given certain plot points that must be incorporated. Maybe we settle when we’ve done the best we can.’

Over the course of a year or so, May comes to terms with painful aspects of her past and begins to realise where her future happiness may lie. Settling is what it’s all about: settling into ourselves and our lives. This is where we see the relevance of May’s work in gardens and of her father’s sheets of paper, reproduced at the beginning of each chapter, with descriptions of trees, their aspects and environments, their interaction with and support for each other.

A lovely, quiet, introspective book that I’d recommend highly.

I really loved this book. I was expecting a fast fun read, and it was fast and in a way fun. But it moved me way more than I expected. I identified with the main character, something that doesn't happen to me very often. Bought a physical copy the minute I finished is.

This book makes you curious and want to keep reading from the first page. By the time I got to the end, I had a new appreciation for nature and (almost) wanted to start a little garden of my own.

One of the things that set this book apart for me was the amount of literary but most of all botanical knowledge that the author imbued the book with. When May entered into a tangent about Grendel in Beowulf or why the shrub in the neighbors garden didn't look healthy enough, she didn't only glanced over it, she took the time to form an opinion supported by not only her biases but the things that she has read and learned beforehand.

With May being a botanist, a certain attention to plants would be expected but the author takes it further with not only several chapters being named after trees but May noticing the state of the plants anywhere she went to, measuring her surroundings by the kind of attention dedicated to them, always knowing the Latin names, where and how they came to be and what was plaguing them.
In the beginning, May reminded me a bit of a less broken and scary Eleanor Oliphant (but maybe that is why I'm also reading that book at the moment) in the way her interaction with others was so often punctuated with awkwardness. She felt the need to research everything from the origin of words to the proper etiquette when visiting friends to what friendship meant.

There is an almost anti-technological feel throughout the book with May buying books when needing to research something instead of googling it, several mentions of having read some article in a magazine and always noticing when people pick up their phones and the way they interact with each other from youngest to oldest. I particularly loved all the little comments about social media, the good and the bad because it is worth noting that May is part of several social networks as well and while in the beginning, she is more passive, only observing and spying on what everyone posts and does, as she goes through her journey she starts to make more use of technology and interact with her friends digitally.

Also, there truly is a list of rules for visiting at the end of the book, which I found really helpful and funny at the same time.

Thank you to NetGalley and Granta Books for this arc.

This is a meditative, hopeful novel about the main character, May, taking a few solo trips to reconnect with old friends. May's voice is solitary and sometimes lonely as she reflects on what it means to be a friend and how important it is while being painfully aware that friendship is not easy to cultivate. It's leisurely-paced as May is very observant and reflective. A familiar read-a-like for me is The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, though Harold was more melancholy (and for that, more memorable). Lovely little story.

May Attaway works as a landscape gardener at the local university. She is granted a month leave from her job and she decides to use the time to visit and reconnect with her long-lost friends.

I had quite a hard getting into the story at first but once I did, I couldn't stop reading. May is an intelligent and a very interesting woman. I loved her passion about trees/plants and classic literature. She reminded me a little of Eleanor (from Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman) because they're both eccentric but also unique in their own ways. I admired May for getting out of her comfort zone and taking risks. I enjoyed seeing how her character develops throughout the story. Eventhough it's way more easier to reconnect with our old friends through social media, I liked that the author still features the good old-fashioned catching up.

I personally loved the writing which is simple yet very distinct. I highlighted quite a lot of great lines. This book has some beautiful sketches of trees and enough facts about trees/plants including their Latin names which was fun to read.

Rules for Visiting is a wonderful and light read that will definitely make you reflect about your relationship with your friends and as well as to yourself.

I cannot say, on reflection what it was about this book that made me request the book but I am so glad I read it. Do you know that feeling when you pick up a book blindly and start reading it and a couple of chapters in something goes 'ping' and the whole thing resonates? I do not just mean just the storyline itself, I mean the tone of the narration and the lead character as well.

I have to admit that this book may not be for everyone, the level of detachment that May 'seems' to feel when narrating or the sudden acceptance of our presence as a listener(sometimes) to her tale might not be interesting to some people. This is the story of May and her presumption at the beginning of what constitutes her life, the definition of friendships and other relationships and ultimately the price of happiness (or its definition). May can be defined using a lot of factors: she loves plants,trees, and gardens, dabbles in etymology and quirky linguistic situations, she reads and indulges in reminiscing as well as a creature of habit. The story is not exactly linear, there are a few examples provided to us to indicate exactly where the story is at any given time and this made it more endearing to me. 

May has been given a chance to take some time off, what she does with this time and how she goes about it and all those tangential conversations that these situations invoke. We are given information about trees and some of it tied up with a book I read recently Around the World in 80 Trees by Jonathan Drori , Lucille Clerc (Illustrations) which seemed serendipitous. It is such a heartwarming, realistic take on friendships and the way life tends to change them. It made me feel very nostalgic and had me reaching out to my college friends. I, like May have been guilty of trying to draw clear distinctive circles to demarcate the position of one person or the other in my life and have learnt that real life doesn't work that way. It is an on-going lesson and a humbling one at that. There is so much more that happens in such a (relatively) small book and I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever thought about Friendship/life in any abstract form.

May Attaway is a bit of an oddity. A middle-aged landscape gardener living with her elderly father, she finds the preoccupations of other people difficult to relate to. Almost intentionally, she seems to have boxed herself in and it's not at all clear how she's going to change.

But she's conscious of the way that other people celebrate friendship and aware that it's a huge part of modern life from which she's excluded. So when her employer gives her a month's paid holiday she decides to use the time to visit the four most important friends from her childhood and student days.

May's reticent and quirky voice is beautifully observed as we follow her on that journey, gradually uncovering the tragedy that cast its shadow over her youth and witnessing the reawakening of emotional articulacy. If you like fast-moving page turners, Rules For Visiting may not be for you but it offers rich rewards to the patient reader.

A good read- it deals with friendship, relationships, past, present and future. If you enjoy a book that is quiet and understated then this for you.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Granta Publishing for my eARC in exchange for my honest unbiased review

May goes on a journey to discover what it means to have and to be a friend. The loss of her mother has made her re-examine what it is to connect with people.

Rules for Visiting is a novel about friendship, a meditative novel and focused on travel and home. May's life is a series of routines: she lives with her elderly father, doesn't see her brother, and doesn't really talk to her neighbours. Though she enjoys her gardening career at the local university, she feels she needs something more, and some paid leave sparks off a chance to revisit some old friendships. As May visits her friends one by one, she reflects on their lives and her own, comparing classic literature and modern communication as she searches for what friendship is.

This is a calming sort of read, light and quirky but with some real meaning sown throughout. It has a precise and distinctive style, reflecting May's thought processes, but leaving gaps for the reader to notice her loneliness and what she isn't saying. The plant and book references are another distinctive feature, again very much linked to May's character but also about how we use different points of reference to track our lives and our friendships.

Rules for Visiting is a quietly quirky book that looks at human connections and dealing with the past and the present. Maybe fittingly, it would make a good book to keep in a spare room or give to a visiting friend: a quick, understated yet moving novel that makes you think about friendship across time.